Crises no longer unfold. Instead, they come looking for you. Our polycrisis atmosphere is the defining feature of the environment practitioners now live and breathe and it exposes a major fault line that threatens us all - the widespread paucity of leadership at exactly the moment we need strength and integrity.
The HR in Aotearoa report published in January put numbers to the problem. Ninety per cent of organisations describe their leadership capabilities as only somewhat adequate or not adequate at all. The report pinpoints the pattern: organisations promote people into leadership based on technical excellence then discover those technical skills don't translate to people leadership. The accidental manager becomes the accidental crisis leader. And in a world where global events reach local organisations instantly, where information arrives before verification is possible and AI shapes interpretation, that gap becomes consequential very quickly.
So when people ask whether AI can help us through the age of chaos or whether it is the G-force propelling us into crises, the honest answer is that it depends on the leadership we are landed with.
The temptation when facing a compounding crisis is to reach for the technology but try your hardest to resist it. Your starting point is long before the crisis hits and it is not the technology. It is a hard look in the mirror to determine where your leadership sits because your leaders need your help more than they need AI right now.
To illustrate what an honest assessment looks like, I ran New Zealand's coalition government through a reputation monitor built as a customised Gemini gem. The initial score came back at 6.2 out of 10: stable but fragile. That didn't match prior assessments or the lived experience of the past two years, which has included the deputy police commissioner's arrest and trial, the ferry cancellation and deliberate policy division. Once corrected with that context, the revised score came in at 4.2. Below a pass mark. Severely diminished social capital and social capital is precisely the thing that allows a country or an organisation to recover from a crisis.
Pushed further on the Prime Minister specifically, the assessment described a leader defined by high technical competence but low emotional and communicative connection. Competent but uninspiring. Much has been made of Christopher Luxon's media training, but media training is no substitute for leadership. It might slightly improve fluency but it cannot manufacture vision.
The coalition partners deepen the problem. ACT's tail wags the dog. NZ First provides the populist surge. They provide the means to govern but create a barrier to leading. The entire term has been characterised by ticking over rather than moving forward and that absence of vision is exactly what fails during a crisis.
Think of the crisis stack as dominoes standing on their ends: reputational, organisational, economic, natural, political, each dependent on the next for balance. Where once a crisis arrived singly, now they wobble against each other. This is the atmospheric river of crises, stuck over the planet and refusing to move on.
Feeding the current US-Israel-Iran conflict into Claude alongside the leadership assessment produced a sobering map. A prolonged conflict is the most likely near-term trajectory. The probability of effective leadership response is low. The probability of maintaining social cohesion under pressure is very low. Not because of the external event itself but because each previous failure of governance has been another domino. One event tips the lot.
The greatest long-term risk identified was not oil prices or KiwiSaver balances. It was the progressive erosion of the country's identity as a small, independent, principled nation capable of speaking truth to power. Once surrendered, that identity is extraordinarily hard to recover.
Layer a natural disaster on top of the geopolitical one and the picture sharpens. New Zealand is entering 2026 from a position of accumulated exhaustion and structural underinvestment. States of emergency for weather events rose from four in 2015 to eight last year, and by early March that figure had already been exceeded. A category three to four ex-tropical cyclone striking the Gisborne–Hawke's Bay–Bay of Plenty corridor while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed is a realistic compound scenario. Government information is treated with suspicion. Iwi, who stand up every time with shelter and comfort, are trusted but inadequately supported. Another domino.
As the analysis put it plainly: the binding constraint in every scenario is a government whose credibility has been so eroded it cannot perform the most essential function of crisis leadership. That function is not operational management. It is the maintenance of public trust sufficient to sustain collective action.
Used well, AI is a compass - prediction, prevention, sense-making during the event and repair afterwards. It can give you the ‘minutes that matter’, to borrow Mike Bush's phrase from his review of the 2023 Auckland floods. It can model scenarios at speed, map stakeholder interdependencies and draft response options. Running the same prompt through Claude, Gemini, Manus and GPT and comparing the outputs is a discipline worth adopting.
But AI cannot substitute for the judgement, empathy and situational intelligence only humans bring. Agents deployed without guardrails will trash reputations, wipe inboxes and trigger actions nobody sanctioned. Rubbish in, rubbish out remains the rule. None of this replaces a leader who can articulate a vision and bring people with them.
When leadership is weak and wobbly, the rest of us cannot sit around waiting for it to fix itself. The initiative has to be taken by organisations, clients and the communities they serve. Take the AI-generated analysis to your leadership team. Show them the view across the mountains. Present a clear timeline for action starting today. Inaction is not a safe harbour. It is a decision to accept the costs.
The time of saying nothing is over. Your choice is between the path of ambiguity and the path of principle. For practitioners advising organisations through the conflict ahead, the work begins with leadership and returns to leadership, with AI as amplifier rather than answer.
